Seitaro Yamazaki Newsletter May 23, 2025
It’s been a little while since my last newsletter—things have been busy with several large projects in motion, and I’ve been keeping up with the usual pace of life.
This time, I have two main updates to share:
Exhibiting at Fringe Arts Bath (FaB)
I’ll be showing work at Fringe Arts Bath, an art event held annually since 2007 in the city of Bath, in southern England. Some of you may know Bath as a historic spa town—the name itself is the origin of the English word “bath”—and it’s also a popular tourist destination. Interestingly, Bath is a sister city of Beppu, a Japanese hot spring town known for its contemporary art scene.
As a global tourist hub, Bath has long hosted a variety of cultural events, particularly in classical music, literature, and children’s literature. These are now combined into the Bath Festivals, a prestigious celebration of high culture:
In contrast, Bath Fringe Festival, which began in the 1980s, focuses on subcultures like street art, popular and folk music, and circus arts. Fringe Arts Bath branched out from this scene, carving its own niche as a contemporary art festival. The fact that it spun off from the subcultural Fringe Festival rather than the highbrow Bath Festivals makes it a particularly intriguing model.
In fact, when we launched Yohaku Art Fair in Hirono, Fukushima, we looked to Fringe Arts Bath for inspiration—alongside Japan’s Beppu Project by Junya Yamaide and the U.S.-based ArtPrize—as a grassroots model for contemporary art events.
Another unique aspect of Fringe Arts Bath is its strong emphasis on supporting emerging curators. This year, 32 young curators or collectives were selected to lead open calls based on their own themes.
I submitted work to a show curated by Isabel Young, a curator at the Royal College of Art, titled “In Search of Ghost.”
Bath has roots as Aquae Sulis, a healing retreat in Roman times, and its ancient Roman baths are still a major draw. The theme of Isabel’s show revolves around “archaeology”—exploring the relationships between past, present, and future through art.
I’m exhibiting “Lay’s” from my speculative fiction-inspired series Fossils from the Future, which imagines what traces of our current consumer society might look like if unearthed in the far future.
Fringe Arts Bath 2025 opens with a reception on May 23, and runs from May 24 to June 7. If you happen to be in England during that time, please do drop by!
A Return to Abstract Ink Painting
Before I began creating contemporary art, I explored several expressive mediums—and one of those was sumi-e, or traditional Japanese ink painting. Some of my early works still bear traces of that influence. Recently, I revisited ink painting for the first time in a long while, though this time as abstract ink work.
As it’s sumi-e, I’ve also included a hanko seal on the piece. Unlike a signature in Western painting, the design and placement of the seal is an integral part of a sumi-e composition.
This piece is still more of a study or experiment, so it doesn’t have a formal title yet. But what stands out to me is how different it feels from my previous ink-based work—color has become the central focus this time. I’m beginning to see new possibilities for expression here, and I may develop this into a new series as contemporary art.
Thanks for reading, and I hope to share more soon.
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